Believe it or not, there are companies out there that build enterprise apps, and yet they are NOT large enough (or don't see a value) to have internal teams devoted to an in house JS framework. For example, I work for a Telecom and although we have large development teams for building various applications for our customers, our focus isn't building and maintaining frameworks.

Every time there is an article about Javascript, there is an individual like you complaining about why Javascript is needed. I'm sorry that all you want to use your browser is to read news on NY Times, but the truth is that there are a lot of people out there who want to do more than just browse static pages. The browser is the most efficient app delivery system today. You no longer have to worry about whether the end user has the latest update of your app, and which OS or version they are running, your app will just work! If you are paranoid and don't trust the browser sandboxing, then maybe you should run Qubes OS or browser in a VM, otherwise, perhaps it is best to stick to printed news.

Yea, try building and maintaining a large scale application using nothing more than vanilla JS. The reason JS frameworks are popular is because they do a whole lot of stuff behind the scenes like variable binding, efficient rendering of the DOM (for example virtual DOM), implementation of patterns such as MVVM, state management, routing, and a whole lot more. There is no way you could build an application such as Youtube or Facebook without some sort of a framework; best case scenario you will end up rolling your own, at which point why not just use one of the many existing ones with a community support and a full time team that is focused solely on the framework development. Unless you are a very large corporation with lots of resources such as Google or Facebook where you can devote resources to building and maintaining your own framework, it doesn't make sense to roll your own. You will make something that works, but works badly and perhaps with lots of security vulnerabilities compared to one of the major frameworks.

They'll allow you to connect to VPNs, but they'll just block all popular VPN providers, then good luck circumventing anything. This whole NN business will kill the internet as we know it.

I think what you fail to understand with the OP's analogy is thinking that this will only impact the consumer, however, this will also have a huge impact on small business. Say a startup decides to competes with Netflix who has very deep pockets, all Netflix has to do is to pay the ISPs more so their service is delivered faster than the startup, effectively killing the competition. This essentially will stifle innovation and consolidate the web down to a few big players (even more than today). Either way, killing NN laws benefits no one, but the few rich corporations.

Personally, I think people are making a mountain of a molehill and thinking there is some nefarious reason behind this. The company I work for uses a product from IBM called Tealeaf which does exactly this, it records user sessions which can then be played back. The reason why we introduced this to our product was to understand our customer better to help us improve our product. For example marketing wanted to know what caused a customer to start a purchase and then stop halfway. They wanted to understand for instance if it was due to a UI error or if the customer found the options confusing? We also used this product in several occasions to identify hard to reproduce bugs. Using this product we were able to watch the recorded user session who experienced the bug and understand exactly what steps he/she took before encountering it. I think for most companies, these kind of products are just there to help marketing or the dev departments improve their products, rather than harvest users behaviors and sell it (I'm sure some do), because I doubt there is much value to some individual's random mouse movements.

Microsoft isn't stopping anyone either as demonstrated by the developer of this patch...

By that logic, in my opinion McDonald's food is garbage so no one should get mad if I walk in and grab whatever I want without paying.

I'm not debating whether or not other countries besides the US interfered in other countries' affairs. All I'm pointing out is that considering the track record of US, it's best to be cautious in regards to accusations by US government, especially when very little evidence has been presented.

The OP said "interfered" not just "overthrow". The United States in its 240 years of history, in one way or another has interfered in the politics of nearly every country in the world. El-Salvador is just one country in that long list.

Salvadoran Civil War
Time for a US apology to El-Salvador
Revisiting American Involvement in El Salvador: The Massacre at El Mozote

Yes, that's what click jacking is. In this case, the attacker increases the chance you click his link to 100%.

You didn't read the article did you? There was no 3rd party content, the attack used Linkedin's OWN CSS!

First of all Linux is far from secure, and this is after a very large community of developers which includes commercial organizations such as Intel, Red Hat, Suse, etc. Secondly, Microsoft develops and maintains their entire tool chain which includes compiler, file system, kernel, desktop manager, etc. On top of that, due to popularity of Microsoft products they are the target of much greater audience, including black/white hat and government agencies. Despite all this, Microsoft still manages to create very secure software with cutting edge security. Obviously they cannot 100% secure their software since software is constantly evolving and as a result new bugs and security issues are introduced, but Microsoft DOES care about the security of their product and that's why they are spending $1 billion on security according to this article.

Yes they have! Microsoft produces very polished and secure products with incredibly fast and consistent response to bugs and security issues for such complex array of software they offer. People on Slashdot with limited technical background simply like to rag on Microsoft with the mentality that Linux rocks/Microsoft sucks.